I guess it was pretty significant that all three of us turned out to be queer. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it further explained why we’d always felt a little different from other kids, and why we’d never clicked with anyone the way we clicked with each other. In any case, it made me even more certain that I would never find anyone who understood me like Maritza and JaKory did.
We still hadn’t told our parents. Maritza’s parents were devout Catholics, and JaKory’s mom was burdened with too many nursing shifts, and my own parents thought I was alien enough already, given that I’d inherited none of their perfect, all-American charm. But it went beyond that, too. We hadn’t told anyone else simply because it wasn’t relevant yet. I’d never kissed anyone, and neither had JaKory. Maritza’s only kiss had been last summer in Panama with some boy who hung out with her cousins. In short, we had no experience, so why worry about making an identity claim? Our sexuality—or, as JaKory sometimes called it, our “like-eality”—was something we all knew to be true, but which hadn’t really drawn a breath yet.
The thing is, I wasn’t sure it ever would.
* * *
“God, I want a boyfriend,” JaKory said, staring dazedly up at the movie he’d picked. He hugged a pillow to his chest like that would help.
“Me too,” Maritza said. “Or a girlfriend. Just someone I can send flirty texts to and make out with whenever I want.”
“Yeah, and eventually do more than make out,” JaKory said, wiggling his eyebrows. “But we need to get the first step down before any of that can happen.” He took a long breath and sighed. “Damn, I need to kiss someone so bad. Don’t y’all wanna kiss someone?”
I nestled further into my blanket. The fact that I was seventeen and had never kissed anyone was not something I liked to think about. As much as my friends wanted to talk about it, I never had anything to say. I guess because I knew, somewhere deep down, that simply talking about it would never get me anywhere.
“I’ve already kissed someone,” Maritza said smugly. She liked to remind us of this achievement at least once a week. I caught JaKory’s eye and mimed stabbing myself in the face.
“I can see you, asshole,” Maritza said, tossing a Gusher at me.
“I know,” I said, tossing the Gusher right back. “And by the way, you kissed a boy.”
“That counts, Codi. I like boys.”
“Yeah, but don’t you want to kiss a girl, too?”
Maritza went silent. She’d gotten more sensitive lately about identifying as bisexual, and for a moment I worried I’d offended her. “Of course I do,” she said in a clipped voice. “I actually think it’ll be better than kissing a boy.”
“How?” I asked.
“I don’t know, like … more delicate.”
“I’d take passionate over delicate,” JaKory said, shaking his head. “I want to feel something. I want it to be like … like the moment you hear a brilliant line of poetry. Like it knocks the breath out of you.”
“I think it feels like the top of a roller coaster, just before the drop,” Maritza said.
JaKory made a face. “You know I hate roller coasters.”
“So? You still know what the top feels like, with butterflies in your stomach and your heart pounding—”
“And like I’m gonna pass out or throw up everywhere—”
“What do you think, Codi?”
I kept my eyes on the TV screen, not looking at them. “I’m not sure,” I said, trying to sound uninterested. I didn’t want any part of their fantasizing; it embarrassed me almost as much as my lack of experience did.
“You’ve never thought about it?” Maritza pressed.
I waited a beat. Maritza and JaKory were silent. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I guess it’s like … I don’t want to overthink it, because I want it to surprise me when it happens.”
They remained silent. Then Maritza said, “Doesn’t that take the agency out of it?”
I craned my neck to look at her. “What?”
“I just mean, like … you can’t just expect to be surprised with your first kiss. Some part of you has to go for it. I mean, if I hadn’t dropped those hints to E.J., or made an effort to see him, we never would have kissed.”
I felt my heart rate pick up. It was typical of Maritza to think she had everything figured out already, but I knew she was right, and I didn’t want to admit it. The problem was, I didn’t know how to “go for it.” I didn’t even know where to start.
Maritza’s point seemed to suck the energy out of the room. None of us were looking at each other; we were all lost in our own thoughts. Then JaKory said, with his eyes on the floor, “My mom and Philip broke up.”
Maritza and I looked up. JaKory’s mom had been dating Philip for a full year, and JaKory often gushed that he’d never seen her so happy.
“What?” Maritza gasped. “When?”
“Last week, during finals,” JaKory mumbled. “I didn’t feel like talking about it. It was easier just to focus on studying.”
Maritza and I exchanged looks. JaKory worried about his mom a lot. She’d divorced JaKory’s dad years ago, and JaKory was always fretting about her being lonely.
“What happened?” I asked gently.
“She said she and Philip weren’t on the same page, that they had the whirlwind but not the calm blue sky.”
“Your mom’s a fucking poet,” Maritza said.
“What if loneliness runs in my genes?” JaKory asked in a low voice. “What if I’ll never experience love because I’m just not compatible with anyone else, like my parents?”
“Oh, ’Kory, of course you will,” Maritza said.
“You’ll definitely find someone,” I said, holding his eyes. “You’re too wonderful not to.”
Even as I said it, I felt a flickering of doubt in the pit of my stomach. If I believed so certainly that JaKory was destined to find someone, didn’t that mean I could believe it of myself, too? And yet I couldn’t fathom how or when that might happen.
Maritza must have been thinking along the same lines, because she gripped her head in her hands and said, “We’ll all find someone. I just need to figure out how.”
It sounded more like a wish than a certainty. For the second time that day, I found myself yearning for something that seemed far outside my reach.
Just then, we heard the upstairs door creak open, followed by footsteps pounding down the stairs. I sat up as JaKory pressed pause on our gay movie; luckily, the frame was only showing the interior view of the main character’s apartment.
My little brother, Grant, zipped around the corner, sweeping his hair out of his eyes. He looked sweaty the way all fourteen-year-old boys look sweaty, even when they’re not. His legs had gotten long but were still so skinny that it almost looked like he was running around on stilts.
“Can you take me to the movies tonight?” he asked breathlessly.
I stared at him for a moment, caught off guard by the request. He hadn’t asked me for anything in months, not since he’d hit his growth spurt and started “feeling himself,” as my dad put it. Grant and I had been pretty close when we were younger—he’d even danced along to some of the Celine Dion choreography that one time—but over the last year, as he’d started to excel in sports and spend more time with his friends, it had become pretty obvious that he saw me as nothing more than his boring older sister.